The development of small form factor, large memory capacity hard drives and other memory devices has facilitated growth of mobile devices for accessing and playing digital media. Mobile devices are particularly useful because they facilitate convenient “on-the-go” access of digital media for their users. Media content is stored in local memory in the mobile device for access by the user when desired. An example of such a mobile device is the Apple® iPOD® media player. The Apple® iPOD® media player provides gigabytes of memory storage. Media software applications, such as Apple® itunes® for example, are executed on a user's computer to store and manage the user's media library and facilitate downloading of desired media content to local memory in mobile devices.
Given the plethora of media content available, users may not have all desired media content stored on their mobile device. Thus, many mobile devices are increasingly being equipped with wireless communication capabilities. Wireless communications allow media devices to access media content not stored locally on the mobile device. Short-range wireless communication allows users to share media content with other users. Many manufacturers are also adding cellular communication capabilities to mobile devices so that media players can access media content over cellular networks from remote service providers. An example of such a mobile device is the Apple® iPhone®, which provides a combined cellular phone and media player into one mobile device.
Because of the plethora of media content available to users of mobile devices, both from locally stored and remotely accessed content, it is increasingly important to provide filtering capabilities. Without filtering, users may have to navigate through large and unmanageable media file listings to find desired media content. Filtering capabilities allow content to be provided to users in more manageable subgroups. To provide filtering, media content can be tagged with one or more static criterion that delineates the content in some manner. For example, if the media content are audio files, the audio files may include a genre tag. If an audio file is of a “Comedy” genre, the media item may be tagged with a “Comedy” genre tag in this example. Thus, if the user of the mobile device only wants to access audio files in the “Comedy” genre, the mobile device can consult the genre tag of the audio files to only provide those files having a “Comedy” genre tag.
One disadvantage of such filtering systems is that they use static-based criterion and are thus non-intelligent. The filtering criterion provided by the tag does not adapt to changes in the environment or context of the mobile device. For example, some media items tagged with a “Comedy” genre tag may be appropriate for some contexts such as home, but not for others such as a work place. Other media items may also be tagged with the “Comedy” genre tag, but may be appropriate for either home or work use. In such systems, media items tagged with “Comedy” genre tags would be filtered equally. Thus, the user may not be able to filter based on the presence of the “Comedy” genre tag effectively, because this filter may include media items that are both appropriate and inappropriate for a particular environment or context of the mobile device. If the mobile device could determine which “Comedy” media items were appropriate for which contexts on an individualized basis, the user could effectively use the “Comedy” genre filter without fear of a contextually inappropriate selection being made.